Twenty Grand

by Rebecca Curtis

  But secretly I admired my grandmother, because she read me the books I liked five times in a row upon demand and kept crystal bowls of foil-wrapped chocolates all around her den. She also hugged me a lot, and at times she sat me down for serious talks:

  “Your mother spends all your father’s money.”

  “I know.”

  “I myself waited twenty years to buy a dishwasher.”

  “I know.”

  “People should only spend what they have.”

  “I agree.”

  “I didn’t even think about a washer or a dryer.”

  “We don’t have a dryer.”

  “Your mother has ruined your father’s life.”

  “I know.”

  “Want to play Rack-O?”

  “Okay.”

  And later:

  “Take this coffee cake to your mother.”

  “She won’t want it.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then say it’s for you.”

  “Okay.”

  WE DROVE the long stretch before the tolls. At the first tollbooth, my mother used the last token in the roll between the seats. She hummed; my sister fell asleep. The snow was falling straight down so that the air seemed both white and light purple and the firs peeked through it from along the side of the road. When the second tollbooth appeared in the distance, my mother’s hand moved through her purse. But she kept looking ahead. Then she passed the purse back to me. “Look in here,” she said. “See if you can find some quarters.”

  I looked. I found safety pins, a tissue, and a dinner mint. “No quarters,” I said.

  She slowed and peered at the tollbooth. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Check and see if you find any under the seats.”

  I climbed past my sister. Her head was on her shoulder, and she had thrush-blobs at the edges of her mouth. I pushed my belly to the hump, and reached into the dark space above each mat. Eventually, I touched a cracker with a soft mauled edge.

  “It’s okay,” my mother said. “It’s all right. Come up.”

  We’d pulled into the toll. My mother looked through the purse herself. Then she told the woman in the booth that she was out of money. That she was sorry, but she could pay the woman on her way back.

  “I’m sorry, too,” the woman said. “But you can’t do that.”

  The woman was older—sixty, perhaps—her hair gray and short. Above the trim of her parka, her large face was grim, or maybe just red from the cold.

  My mother took a picture from her wallet and handed it up. “I’m going to see my husband,” she said. “This is him. He’s at the base down the road. I can get cash from him as soon as I get there, and I’ll come right back.” She hesitated. “You can keep the I.D. if you need something to hold,” she said.

  The woman pointed toward the empty lot to the right of the tolls.

  My mother pleaded with the woman, to the extent that she was capable of it, saying we were an hour from home, the roads were bad, she couldn’t turn around now, had two kids in tow—but her pleading, more insistent than humble, just made the woman mad. The woman said that if my mother did not pull over she would sound an alarm.

  My mother looked down at her lap. Her lips pressed together; she seemed nonplussed. She reached into her purse, unzipped a small pocket, and removed the old coin.

  “Here,” she said. “It’s the same as a dollar.”

  The woman stuck out her arm, took it, and grunted.

  For the rest of the ride, my mother did not speak, and when we arrived at the bunker we did not go in. Instead, we stood outside the fence. I was cold, and I could see Derek, the chief guard inside the gate, waiting to check me. I mentioned this.

  “You don’t need to be checked,” my mother said.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I need to be checked.”

  Derek smiled at me. His smile said, We have serious business to do. I know we might not be able to do it now. But later, I will check you.

  At last my father came out. He was grinning. The electric gate lifted. He ducked under and swung out his arms.

  My mother walked into them.

  Derek looked away, in order to preserve our dignity—mine and his.

  “What’s wrong?” my father said.

  She shook her head.

  We got back into the car and drove past a frozen marsh and some acres of trailers to the guesthouse: a yellow one-story building with a flat tar roof. Its entry consisted of a dining room—a room with a table long enough for several families to eat at—and a kitchenette with a fridge that was always empty except for the perpetually abandoned Chinese food in deteriorating, grease-soaked brown bags. Above the stove were cupboards containing sugar packets, mouse turds, and instant coffee. Down a hall were three bedrooms, each equipped with bed, nightstand, ashtray, clock radio. Typically two or three families made use of the guesthouse at any one time, and the sounds of radio static floated through the hall. In the living room, two brown couches sat atop an orange rug. Behind them was a bin of toys I knew well: plastic rabbits with foolish, ink-smeared faces and stuffed bears with crusty patches on their bodies.

  I was dumped in the living room. My mother pulled my father into a bedroom. I turned on the TV and set my sister in front of it. Then I slipped down the hall and sat by the bedroom door.

  At first I heard the usual sounds: low voices, metal legs scraping the floor, the radio. Then there was fiscal talk. My mother asked for money. He gave her a ten. She asked for a twenty. He told her ten was all he had, save for a five he’d set aside for himself. She said we needed groceries.

  “You got groceries last week,” he said.

  “We need groceries for this week,” she said.

  “Here,” he said. He gave her the five.

  “I don’t want it,” she said. “What will you use?”

  “The food here is free.” He paused. “If I want a beer,” he added, “I’ll borrow a few bucks from the guys.”

  “You have tokens?”

  “Yeah. I have a roll in my car.”

  A sound escaped her: a sigh.

  My knees had fallen asleep. Intriguing Chinese-food smells were coming from the kitchen: another couple had finished their nap and heated some up. I wanted food, and thought they might give me some if I asked, but was too intrigued to leave the door.

  “I can’t do it,” my mother said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  “Come on, Annah.”

  “I’m by myself with the girls for a week. Your mother calls every day. I go crazy.”

  “Why don’t you just tell her when I’ll be home?”

  “It’s not her business.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “You need to get another job.”

  “We tried that already.”

  “I need to see you at night. I want you to come home at night like other men.”

  “I’ll apply for shorter shifts.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  They went back and forth for a while. Truly, I think, he liked his job. He’d never been in a war. Or only twice, and only to fly refuelers for the bombers, which meant he’d hovered beyond missile range and hardly seemed to count. Finally, she said, “I spent my coin.”

  “Your coin?”

  “My mother’s coin.”

  “You spent that coin?”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “I wish you hadn’t spent that coin.”

  “Well, I did.”

  Nothing. Then, “Why did you do that?”

  “I needed money for the toll.”

  “You said you’d never spend it.”

  “I told you, I was out of money. I needed money for the toll.”

  Silence.

  “It was my coin,” she said.

  I knew the coin. I knew that my mother’s mother had given it to her just before she died, and that she’d died when my mother was a child. During her life, she’d worked as the superintendent
of two apartment buildings in Watertown, Massachusetts, and had owned a corner store. She was heavy-set, kept her hair in a bun, and wore a gray wool dress and single strand of pearls, even when collecting rent from tenants or loading coal into a furnace. She had not been home much. But she’d had a lot of friends and had loved her life. In the hospital, she gave my mother the coin and said that it was a dollar, and that if my mother kept it, she would always have a dollar in her purse.

  “That coin was very valuable,” my father said.

  “I know,” my mother said. “It was money.”

  “No, Annah, that coin was worth a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it was worth a lot.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “You would have spent it.”

  Silence. He was right. She would have spent it. Then, “How do you know?”

  A long pause. “I got it evaluated.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty grand,” he said.

  A cave opened its mouth in my heart. I knew what twenty grand was. I knew what a googol, the largest number in the world, was, too—a hundred zeroes—but twenty grand seemed better. I saw a lifetime of unshared Happy Meals and always getting a soda with dinner at Ye Olde Tavern restaurant. I knew that with twenty grand we couldn’t have bought the ocean but it seemed to me that we could have bought Wallace Sands, the beach we went to, and perhaps its section of ocean, and the Isles of Shoals, which my mother was always pointing out and which appeared from the shore as a long humpy gray shadow on the horizon, like a whale.

  “You tricked me,” she said. I’d heard her sound indignant before, but I’d never heard her sound indignant and justified. “You tricked me,” she said again.

  “I didn’t trick you,” my father said. “I just didn’t tell you.”

  She said nothing.

  He cleared his throat. “We’ll get it back.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll get it back.”

  “How?”

  His plan unfolded. It was simple and obvious: The lady would still be at the tollbooth. They’d give her a dollar, or a ten if need be, and get the coin back. A discussion followed. They’d get it back. Then they’d sell it. They would? They really would. Were they partners? They were. Was my father willing to quit the military, sell the house, and move us someplace warmer and more exciting, like Portsmouth? No, he wasn’t sure about selling the house. But he thought we could rent it out—maybe some skiers might want it—and use the money to rent a small place in Portsmouth. As for the Guard, he said, he wouldn’t mind getting out. The Guard had been good to him. But he didn’t want to be a Guard bum forever. He knew guys who’d opened franchises—Kentucky Fried Chickens—and done well. “You just need”—his voice deepened—“seed money and a loan.” The bed creaked. If she still wanted to go to school, he said, he was willing to help her look into it.

  She said, “I want to decorate it myself. The house.”

  He said, “I’d like a garage.”

  “We have to be careful. We don’t want to spend it all at once.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I’d like a new couch,” she said.

  “You can have that,” he said. “I’d like a garage.”

  “First the move,” she said. “Then see what’s left.”

  MY FATHER CHECKED OUT on a one-hour emergency pass. We all got into my mother’s car. We drove to the exit of the base, stopping at the gatehouse so that my father could show the pass to the guard. The guard was young, with blond eyebrows and fat hands. He saw us, read the pass, and stopped smiling. He said, “Don’t be late, Bill.” The gate rose. We headed back the way we’d come.

  On the way, I saw a McDonald’s. It was in a valley that we could see from the highway, a big gold “M” in the distance. I requested a stop. I mentioned my desire for a Happy Meal.

  “We don’t have any money,” my mother said.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “You have ten dollars.”

  “The ten dollars is not for Happy Meals,” she said. “It’s for groceries.”

  I made what I felt was a tragic sound.

  “Just wait,” she said. “There’s crackers in the glove compartment.”

  “No crackers,” I wailed.

  She reached back and slapped me.

  The slap was weak and barely touched my skin. But I was humiliated, because she was my great love. I vowed that I would never care for her again.

  We pulled over just before the tollbooths. We parked in the shameful turnaround lot. My mother and father got out and spoke together near the car. Then they opened my door and studied my sister and me.

  “What about them?” my mother said.

  My father shrugged. “We’ll just be a minute.”

  She glanced at the tollbooths. Hers was fifth, in a row of ten. Snow-laden trucks were sliding up to the booths at thirty miles an hour, floating on ice and sometimes missing the stop. She held out her palm, and in an instant the flakes falling on it became water.

  She said, “We could carry them.”

  He checked his watch. “Leave them here.”

  She looked at me, said, “Stay in the car,” and shut the door.

  I watched them walk to the edge of the highway and grab hands. They stood and waited for several minutes while trucks passed. Then they ran across the first lane, paused on the first toll island, and dashed across again.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I asked my mother what had happened and she said it wasn’t my business. But after I asked her a fourth time, she told me.

  THE WOMAN WAS still there.

  “Sure, I remember you,” she said. “You gave me this.” She held it up.

  Just then a blue sedan slid into the stall. My parents hurried up onto the platform behind the booth, a raised nub, and squished themselves against the booth’s metal side. “I have a dollar now,” my mother said, when the sedan was gone. “This is my husband.” My father said, “Hello, I’m Bill,” in his most charming, glad-to-meet-you voice. The woman nodded.

  “I came to get my coin back,” my mother said. She held out a token.

  The woman shook her head. “This coin belongs to me,” she said.

  “It’s my coin,” my mother said.

  “You gave it to me,” the woman said, “and now it’s mine. I took it out of the box”—she pointed to a cardboard box on a metal counter—“and I replaced it with my own dollar.”

  A car veered into the stall. My parents climbed back onto the nub. More cars followed. When they stepped down, my mother had to shout to be heard above the traffic. “I didn’t give it to you,” she said. “I left it with you for safekeeping.”

  The woman told my parents to leave. She said she wasn’t a fool. She knew the coin was worth money. She could tell, because it looked old. She’d called a friend who knew about coins, and the friend had said it sounded valuable, perhaps very. My mother nodded. Then she begged. The coin was the only thing she had of her mother’s, she said, and her mother had died when she was nine. It was why she’d kept it all these years. Yes, it was worth something. But it was sentimental to her. It was her memory, really, of her mother.

  My father rubbed his nose. “It’s not worth much,” he said.

  The woman gestured my parents back onto the nub. Then she opened a panel in the booth, and spoke to them through it while she serviced cars. Her own mother was not alive, of course, she said. Her own mother had died years ago. She herself was sixty-two and worked in a tollbooth. She had arthritis and shingles, not to mention other things. She shrugged, and said she was getting it appraised by a dealer, and selling it.

  They had been at the booth for half an hour. The sky was dark.

  If they didn’t leave now, the woman said, she’d call the police.

  My mother leaned forward. “It’s worth twenty grand,” she said.

  The woman blinked, and waved my mother away.

  WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the lot, they found that w
e were gone. My father was enraged—he was overdue on his emergency pass—but he proposed a plan.

  My mother agreed to his plan. She started walking north along the shoulder, looking for us. But then she turned into the woods. She felt sure that wandering into them was something I might have done. It was, but it was equally something she herself might have done. There were an infinite number of places to enter the forest, which stretched darkly, politely, on both sides of the road. It was overwhelming, but also irresistible. My mother was compelled, perhaps, by the hopelessness of the task. Of course, footprints would have been the thing to look for; but the snow was falling thickly and had already left two inches on top of the Rabbit, and she decided that it had covered our tracks. She walked into the forest until she could no longer hear the cars on the highway, and sat down. A tree, a handsome green pine, immediately dropped a load of snow on her head. She brushed it off. Her jeans grew wet. The forest said shuh, shuh, and the pines leaned to and fro in the wind. Thirty more minutes passed; my father strode back and forth by the tollbooths, looking for my mother. He was unable to find her tracks in the dark. He shouted her name and swore a lot. When he finally saw her footprints, he followed them a quarter mile into the woods and found her sitting, covered in snow, under the spruce.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Get up.”

  “It’s too late,” she said. “They’re gone. We’ve lost them, and it’s my fault. I never should have left them in the car.”

  He was a fool, but he was not a fool. He saw that she was pining for the coin.

  He slapped her.

  “We’re looking for the girls,” he said.

  They trudged back to the car. They opened the choke, pumped the gas, and turned the car on. Then they got out the brush and the scraper and brushed off the snow and scraped off the ice, and got in.

  AFTER MY PARENTS had left, I’d unbuckled my sister and pulled her from the car. I’d walked us south along the shoulder toward McDonald’s. We’d gone about thirty feet when a white sedan pulled over. The door opened, and a woman in a burgundy coat stepped out. She asked me where our parents were. My sister began to cry. I said they’d gone on an errand, and saw, in the woman’s face, that she thought we’d been abandoned. She asked me where my parents’ vehicle was; I walked her to it. When she saw the Rabbit—with its mismatched fenders (one orange, one blue) and rusty frame—I saw that she thought they’d left the car behind, too. She squatted down, there in the lot, and brought her large white face close to mine. She asked if I was hungry. I nodded. Her brow wrinkled. She asked if my sister and I had eaten that day at all. We’d had meat loaf right before leaving home. But for some reason when I looked at her long burgundy coat my mouth twitched and I said, “Just crackers.”